The Last Run (4 page)

The best places to wander in Sitka were on the main street and along the wharves. There were many ways to get from Georgia Kite’s, where he paid to sleep on a couch, to the waterfront. The quickest was down Jeff Davis Street. He would walk in the opposite direction of the veterans’ cemetery, make a right at the tennis court and then a stroll along Lincoln past Crescent Harbor. He had never seen anyone play on the court and he often wondered, in a place that saw more than 270 days of rain a year, if anyone ever got a chance to use it. Soon he would see the stone figures of the seals, glistening and lazy looking, and behind them, the harbor. The bigger boats—the
nicer
boats — tied up at Crescent. Many had fiberglass hulls and fresh paint and cabins and galleys as cozy as the rooms at the Super 8 motel over on Harbor Drive. It was a pretty harbor, a picturesque harbor, with the mountains, piney dark and coldly whitecapped in the backdrop, dominating the sound but far enough away to not leave any shadows, and yet he did not like it as much as the other harbors, the ANB and Old Thompsen. Perhaps it was too pretty a harbor; it lacked an edge. Still, he liked to walk past it on windy days when the boats pitched a little in their slips, their masts wagging this way and that in a strange unison, like the quills on the back of a moving porcupine. Some days he would spot bald eagles huddled darkly atop the masts and he and the birds would stare at one another. They were looking for their next meal, he would say to himself, and so was he. When he could not find work he might take a bench on the concrete landing and watch the eagles and listen to the surf under the pier. It was a lonely sound but a soothing sound as well, and after a while of sitting in a trance he would snap upright and glance around, as if a hand had shaken him a moment after he had nodded off.

Since he usually had no appointments, no invitations anywhere and no money in his pocket, he often stood alone on the O’Connell Bridge and sipped from a can of warm beer. It was always pleasant crossing bridges. Sometimes he thought he should have lived somewhere like Paris. Sitka had only the one bridge. It linked Baranof Island to Alice Island. Alice Island had the city airport, the Coast Guard air station, the officers’ club, the exchange and Coast Guard housing. He had lived on that side of the bridge once, on Lifesaver Street. That was when he had the package: the wife, the kids, the house, the rank, the uniform, the minivan. That was some package, all right.

Now he lived on the other side of the bridge, at Georgia Kite’s. The house of misfits. That’s what it was, all right. He was a misfit, too. What else, he thought, do you call a guy who scuttles about the docks like a roach looking for broken pots to fix? A guy who bums cigarettes from strangers? A guy who gazes like a human vegetable at the broken reflections of boat rigging in the water, who stops at the same monuments around town to read, over and over, the same old inscriptions?

There was one inscription he especially liked, though. It was the one on the Tlingit canoe out front of the Centennial Hall. Te
Kot Keh Yao,
it read. Everybody’s Canoe. Not ten feet away sat the statue of Aleksandr Andreevich Baranov. Baranof. Now,
there
was a misfit. He looked all stern and spiffy, old Baranof did, in his top boots, colonial coat and necktie, sitting there with a scroll in his fist and his gaze fixed on his colony. Russian America. Some colony. Maybe that’s why the artist had left a couple of holes where the eyes should have been. There was no looking into the future.

When he tired of the bridge, Bob Doyle liked wandering downtown. There was the Moose Lodge, the Columbia bar, an electronics shop, a pizza joint, a pelt shop, a trinket shop, the Veterans’ Hall, Old Harbor Books, the Sitka Hotel, Ernie’s Saloon, a pharmacy and, of course, squatting in an oval in the center of the street, the Cathedral of St. Michael. The original Russian church had burned down in the 1960s and the city had built a fireproof replica. A fine replica, he remembered thinking, the first time he saw it. So neat and perfect. Now it bored him. He never did think much of churches. Perhaps it was because he was such a crummy Catholic, but probably not, and he routinely shuffled by the cathedral, hulking gray and white-trimmed and clean looking, but not very inviting and altogether too perfect, on his way to someplace more important, say, the Moose Lodge or the Columbia.

Sometimes he would pause outside of the bookshop. It looked impressive enough through the big windows, the books carefully stacked and arranged, their covers shiny in the display lights. He would read all the covers and on days when the rain was coming down especially hard he would spot a notice scribbled on the side of a grocery bag: PLEASE DON’T DRIP ON THE BOOKS. He rarely entered. He liked standing out on the sidewalk, looking in. Sometimes he might see a reflection of himself in the glass. He would see a tall man, stooped, somewhat below the threshold of slender, with a drawn, unnaturally white face that could have been borrowed from a leaden mask. On top of the man’s head sat a rumpled, olive green cap. When he removed it, he looked a lot older. Most of his scalp was bare, shiny at his north pole, with cantilevers red as shrimp tumbling down the back and sides. He had a sharp nose, a long chin covered in a shaggy tuft of red-and-white hair and sad, sheepish eyes. The eyes were devoid of any traces of confidence. Sometimes as he gazed at the face in the glass he would nod, as though nodding at a stranger.

Katlian Street, the road that snaked along the waterfront, he found pleasantly run-down. It had once been all Tlingit clan houses. Now it was the guts of Sitka’s fishing industry. Along the waterfront was the Halibut Hole coffee shop, the ANB Harbor, the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall and the cold storages and supply outlets. There was also the Pioneer Home for retired fishermen, the Pioneer Bar for active fishermen, the Tlingit cultural house, a shop where Natives sold handwoven baskets, painted figurines and beaded crafts, and a soup-and-sandwich place decorated with maps and fishing gear. The rest of the street was sagging frame houses and lots empty except for weeds, bald tires, rusting fuel drums, discarded nets, tarps, buckets, oil cans, newspapers and pallets.

Sometimes when he passed the gift shop Bob Doyle paused to read the faded sign hanging on the glass front door:

Below it hung a second sign:

Mornings he would make the rounds looking for work: the harbormaster’s office, the pier, the cold storages, the fish brokerages, the packing houses, the supply outlets, then stroll along the waterfront and watch the many gulls and ravens that took off flying when he crept close to them. Afterward he might, or might not, stop to see a friend, Eric Calvin, who kept his small, steel shrimping boat tied up on the quay. Calvin had tried to help him once by bringing him along on a shrimping trip near Tenakee Springs. For almost eight weeks they had worked the inlets around Tenakee, but in the end they came away with barely enough to pay for the Old Milwaukees they emptied at a café there run by a Philippine woman. Calvin had written it off as bad luck. Sure, he had told Calvin. Story of my goddamned life.

On his way home he would stop at the Sitka Job Center on Lake Street. He might toss down a few cups of free coffee, sneak a couple of cookies and scan the bulletin boards. If he saw a job posting, he’d print out a copy of his résumé on a sheet of paper, lick the envelope and hand it to Bonnie Richards, the manager. He couldn’t see why he bothered. The Coast Guard wouldn’t give him a good word if he applied for a ticket taker’s job at the circus. But Mrs. Richards would smile that terribly bright smile of hers, and he would put on his best face until he felt it pulling out of shape and then he would be out on the street again, the night falling cold and damp and the display windows of the shops already dark. Mrs. Richards. She actually cared about him. Why? He couldn’t understand how. He really couldn’t. He needed to start doing that—caring about himself. He needed to get some forward motion. Sure. That and some courage.

G
eorgia Kite’s house was a picture of decay. On sunny days the outside shingles had the hue of mildew; on rainy days, cigar ash. The roof, drooped in the middle, was covered in chinks of moss as thick as any on a dying spruce. The driveway looked as though it served as the neighborhood dump: stove parts, coffee cans, tarps, sawhorses, snowmobiles, motorbikes, tires, monkey wrenches, a bathtub, grease guns, a pressure cooker, hoses, fuel drums, rolls of fiberglass insulation and a half-dozen three-wheelers in varying stages of dismantlement. The front door was broken —nailed shut—and there was no way to get to it in any case, since the front stairway and stoop were missing. To enter Georgia Kite’s, one needed to trump around back, climb the steps of a flimsy, molding stairway and tap on the kitchen door.

The kitchen itself was a shambles, the sink somewhere under a jumble of encrusted pots, liquor bottles and dishes, the floor occupied by stacks of beer cans and tinned food, from Del Monte green beans to Campbell’s cream-of-mushroom soup to Carnation fat-free powdered milk. The living room had three couches, a recliner, a coffee table, two TVs, dual VCRs and a pair of radios that usually bleated discordantly on different programs at the same time. On the paneled walls, at peculiar angles, hung a black Eskimo mask, a painting of sailboats on a pink ocean, a feathered, Indian headband, the spoked wheel of a troller and the American flag, upside down and fraying at the edges. Bits of underwear, ashtrays and empty cans lay scattered among the pillows and cushions, and the window shades were stuck to the panes with packing tape. The house had an odd blend of odors, the heaviest of which was the sticky, stale smell of old nicotine, no telephone, no clocks that kept accurate time, vases without plants, leaking pipes that left dark blotches on the tiled ceiling, and carpets sticky with beer and bodily fluids.

There was an upstairs bedroom, which Georgia had fixed up with a queen bed, a lamp she got at a garage sale and a cracked window shade and rented out at $350 a month to a newcomer named Dale. But the real action was in the basement. It had a bar, complete with kegs, blenders, a stash of Stoli, Jim Beam, Canadian Hunter, shotglasses and mixers, bottle openers and a neon Budweiser lamp. There was a Foosball table, two regulation-size pool tables, an electronic dartboard and a poker table. Smiling from the walls were centerfolds in their birthday suits, a poster of Mount St. Helen’s erupting and a notice: PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE HUMANS. The couches showed their stuffing, but were comfy, and through a door was a room with a queen-size bed—that kind of room — and a ceiling light that, not so remarkably, never worked.

Some of Sitka’s wildest and longest-running parties took place down there, and after a while people around town just started calling Georgia Kite’s place the Basement. Once the P-Bar, Pilothouse, Ernie’s, the Columbia and Rookies shoved their patrons out at two o’clock, in accordance with the local liquor laws, the rank and file simply filed on over to Jeff Davis Street and carried on in the Basement, oftentimes through the following afternoon.

Georgia didn’t mind crowds. She was extra soft on fishermen—her second husband, a cook, had gone down with a fishing boat—but she took in loggers, miners, dope peddlers, faith healers, hypnotists, cheating spouses, college tramps, circus workers, swindlers, grifters, hookers. She took in anyone who didn’t molest children or kill people, though, in fact, more than a few felons had found temporary refuge there at one time or another, without her knowing their shady deeds. Regulars got charged a “maintenance fee” of seven dollars a night for a couch, payable upon departure and IOUs negotiable, but visitors were allowed to sleep it off on the floor, free of charge.

Georgia Kite’s might have been classified as a roadhouse, if anything like a road network existed through southeast Alaska. Instead, it came to be known as a 24/7 “rest house” —a stop at the end of the line for America’s end-of-the-roaders. A landing pad for drifters, dreamers and derelicts, for those who rejected —and got rejected by—suburbia. Not a house for the homeless; rather, it was a tent with a roof and walls —a tent for flower children and forever children, for the professional gone hobo, for rootless men and women who had nothing but each other.

It was the last door in Sitka open to Bob Doyle.

After Bob Doyle’s “retirement” from the Coast Guard, the officer who took over his duties in supply had been nice enough to rent him an apartment he owned in town. He was booted after ten days for not coming up with the rent. Later, he rented a trailer out on Halibut Point Road but the same thing happened. He went door-to-door, staying with friends until their friendliness ran out, and then one day at the Pioneer Home, the retirement home for fishermen, an old-timer told him to look up an old gal with a heart as big as Mother Teresa’s, Georgia Kite.

He had been untangling longline gear and repairing shrimp pots down at the ANB Harbor, but he was not making anywhere near enough to drink and pay real rent. So one afternoon, after he had woken up with a whiskey rug in his mouth, he packed his old dress blues and some personal effects in two cardboard boxes and turned up at the kitchen door of the house on Jeff Davis Street.

A dog yelped. He squinted through a film of grease on the glass-paned door. A man with dark eyebrows closed in together and a cigarette stuck to his lower lip opened the door. His lean face wore a scowl.

“What?”

Bob Doyle introduced himself, raising a furrow of mild disgust on the man’s forehead.

“So you’re the Coastie?”

“Ex,” Bob Doyle said.

The man nodded. His close-set, dark eyes studied him now without rancor. “Right. Well, I’m Gino. John Gino. C’mon in. Leave your shit wherever you can find some floor.”